Who wouldn't love a Jack Ryan movie? That american character created by Tom Clancy that's not a spy but a CIA Analyst who's humility equals to that of his brilliance. There were a lot of movies made with this character and we love Harrison Ford playing this role.
The film starts off with the coast guard finding a yacht piloted by some drug cartel people with dead rich couple who unfortunately has close ties with the US President. Of course an investigation followed and the CIA found out that the dead rich couple wasn't as clean as the President knew. His friend was laundering money for the Colombian drug cartel. He was assumed to have been killed as he skimmed 650 million dollars from them. This lead to the President freezing the money for the government much to the behest of the cartel leader Ernesto Escobedo.
In retaliation for the death of the dead couple, the US President then proceeds to take action against the cartel. This action is unknown to the US Congress and was done through another CIA official in Bob Ritter. They know Jack Ryan was a good guy and wouldn't approve of the operation thus the need for Bob. He would run operation "Reciprocity" with John Clark (played by Willem Dafoe), who formed an elite squad undertaken to cripple the drug operations and to kill its leaders.
Along the way some twists and turns, Escobedo got hold of the US interfering in his operations and asked for a truce using his Intelligence Officer Felix Cortez. They agreed that US operations would stop in Colombia and in return, the cartel will drastically reduce the volume of drugs being shipped to the United States.
This cessation of hostilities came at a price, the squad formed by Clark was captured and some were killed for which Bob Ritter blamed Jack Ryan for it. This was a ruse to make John Clark angry at Jack, angry enough to be killed by him. Good thing John Clark knew that he was being played by Bob, thus our favorite character was saved from being killed.
With Bob's play known to Clark, the latter then sided with Ryan who proceeded to have a plan to save Clark's captured crew. In the process he was able to neutralize the cartel's Cortez, taken cared of Escobedo and was able to point the unauthorized use of power by the US President.
We love the play between Jack Ryan and Felix Cortez (whom they call he Latin Jack Ryan). They are both analysts and would try to outwit the other with their minds. A play with the other characters make this movie interesting. James Earl Jones made a brief appearance here as the CIA Director and he is great here. Other notable actors who impressed us here were Willem Dafoe (CIA Team Leader) and Joaquim de Almeida as the Intelligence Officer.
This movie is tops in my list for a marathon simply because of Harrison Ford and the Jack Ryan character. He played it so well that it never bores me to watch this over and over again. The storyline is rich and the story telling is as seamless as it can be. The twist and turns keep you guessing and the side stories are also interesting.
This is available on Netflix should you wish to watch it.
